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A Change to Google Code Download Service

Monday, May 20, 2013

Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects. Each project comes with its own member controls, Subversion/Mercurial/Git repository, issue tracker, wiki pages, and downloads service.

Downloads were implemented by Project Hosting on Google Code to enable open source projects to make their files available for public download. Unfortunately, downloads have become a source of abuse with a significant increase in incidents recently. Due to this increasing misuse of the service and a desire to keep our community safe and secure, we are deprecating downloads.

Starting today, existing projects that do not have any downloads and all new projects will not have the ability to create downloads. Existing projects with downloads will see no visible changes until January 14, 2014 and will no longer have the ability to create new downloads starting on January 15, 2014. All existing downloads in these projects will continue to be accessible for the foreseeable future.

If your project is using downloads to host and distribute files and has a need to periodically create new downloads, we recommend you move your downloads to an alternate service like Google Drive before January 15, 2014. If you choose to move your files to Google Drive, check out our help article.